The architecture used by streaming protocols such as RTMP requires a media server to interact with the media client. Any media processing cloud (hereinafter generically referred to as “data processor”) thus needs to be connected to a number of these servers. In an interactive application with several users, one or many of these media servers can be used, for streaming from the clients to the data processor and back. The whole set of networks providing data transport between the media client and the data processor will hereinafter be referred to as the “transport network”.
Presently, no satisfactory mechanisms exist to characterize the full transport network that is being used for multimedia streaming, in terms of bandwidth, delay, burstiness, packet loss probability etc. These parameters affect the quality experienced by the end user.